Guy Kawasaki interviews Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL

Had a lovely conversation this afternoon with Leslie Hawthorn, the Googler who has been instrumental in helping with the ongoing sponsorship and logistics of the upcoming MySQL unconference. We went over the details of the Google location to be used as the venue for the event. It just so happens that I am already familiar with the exact area involved, as the team of six or so MySQLers that went to Google in April to give some sessions actually toured through the same location and ate at the same cafeteria that MySQL camp will be housed next to.

I will be adding all of this information to the camp wiki later tonight or tomorrow, but I wanted to blog about the event details here to cast a bit of a wider net. There are currently 13 participants signed up to attend the event, but that does not include a number of MySQLers that I believe will be coming down for the event. It also does not include …

I spend some time on this last night to figure it out with MySQL Cluster NDB API.. Actually, I had to ask my dear colleagues for help. Pekka gave a tip, I added some weird logic: bingo!

Actually, nothing special, but here is the silly code inserting a record into a table with a BLOB field. The oper->equal("id",4) line and the order of things are important. Note: it is missing lots of stuff, like checking for errors!

Enjoy! I might blog more of those silly things later on. Hopefully it makes the manual. Jon, this one is or you!

void blob_insert(Ndb *ndb)
{
         const NdbDictionary::Dictionary* dict = ndb->getDictionary();
         const NdbDictionary::Table *table = dict->getTable("blobby");

         NdbTransaction *trans = ndb->startTransaction();
         NdbOperation *oper = trans->getNdbOperation(table);

         // The data we inserting in the blob field
         char …

Uber-blogger Guy Kawasaki has continued his tradition of asking good questions of technical and business leaders in "Ten Questions with Marten Mickos".  Guy is one of the best speakers and authors in Silicon Valley.  His book "The Art of the Start" is a great resource for anyone thinking of starting a company.

He understands how to get things done and knows that inside the sausage factory sometimes things don't always look so good.  But he's not an armchair quarterback: Guy was chief evangelist at Apple (twice) and is CEO of garage.com Garage Technology Ventures which invests in early stage companies such as iStockPhoto, Kaboodle, SimplyHired and TripWire. Coincidentally, a lot of …

Guy Kawasaki is a prominent blogger who writes about the technology and business world, and usually has some dead-on commentary about working in the corporate world, about technology in general, and about the jungle that is the venture capital world.

Today, he published a ten-question interview with Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, which has some great information that shows not only the kind of person that Marten is, but also how he (and others at MySQL) view MySQL's emerging role in the enterprise DBMS community, and the open source community in general.

One of the things I really liked in the article was the following (duh, I am a community guy, after all!):

At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a …

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting interview over on his blog with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL.

Here are a few gems, with my commentary:

In response to the question, "How do you make money with an Open Source product?":

We start by not making money at all - but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business.

Then we sell an enterprise offering to those who need to scale and cannot afford to fail. The enterprise offering consists of certified binaries, updates and upgrades, automated DBA services, 7x24 error resolution, etc. You pay by service level and the number of servers. No nonsense, no special math. Enterprise software buyers are tired of complex pricing models (per core, per cpu, per power unit, per user, per whatever the vendor feels like that day) - models that are still …

In my last post MySQL Benchmarking 1, I was installing Sysbench on a Solaris 10 machine. However I stopped at

./configure

because I was getting compiler errors due to the SUNWsprot and SUNWsprot Sun OS packages not being installed.

After getting them installed on the server I tried to run the ./configure again and this time although the compile process went a little further, it stopped after throwing the following errors.

checking how to run the C preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: C preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details.

Elvis has left the building, and yes we have removed the BDB engine from MySQL.

Last night I saw a blog post about the removal before I went to bed. Link to the post is here, along with my response:
http://www.webyog.com/forums//index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=3&showentry=68

Removing the BDB engine, aka Sleepycat's Berkeley database, from the list of internal engines has been on my list to do for a while. If you follow the way I went about removing it, it should be easy to transform it into a plugin now.

Why as a plugin?

Right now we don't spend energy on keeping the BDB engine up to date. Which makes us look bad, and it makes Oracle look bad. What is worse is that the BDB engine used a forked version of the Sleepycat code. The BDB engine should not be using …

I went through elementary school in the 1980s. As such, I was taught that there are winners and losers. My kids learn that "We are all SPECIAL!!!" but I quickly disabuse them of that notion at home. Kill or be killed. Eat that hamburger or your wily 15-month old sister will. The Asay house is quintessentially Hobbesian as we live out our nasty, brutish, and short lives. :-)

I'm kidding, but my 80s mentality has me wondering: with all the open source momentum (and it is real), who is losing? See, it's not possible for everyone to win together all the time. It's not exactly zero sum, but in a relatively finite market, my success may well correlate to your failure.

So who is losing?

Apparently not Oracle. Not yet, anyway. Jason Maynard of CSFB has ORCL at an "Outperform" rating, writing this morning:

For Q1, we are estimating $3.47B in total …

I'll be on holidays from the 25th of August till the 5th of September. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to give an update on the current status of SQLbusRT.

Coding has almost finished. With almost finished, I mean it is almost ready for the first test runs. It is still a very simple implementation. It will give me some baseline figures when I execute my first performance tests, but it does not have all the planned functionality yet.

I'm not publishing the code yet. I want to have the code reviewed by some collegues first, and perhaps it's better to wait for the results of the first test runs to see whether the taken approach is a good one.

I've finished setting up a network of computers to run my tests on. All computers run linux, with the possibility of choosing a patched or an unpatched kernel on boot. The patched kernel offers preemption. This will be used to give real time priority to the …